(+++) TALES OF SHARED TIMES

What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation. By Charlie Wells. Abrams Press. $28. 

     It could have been worse. Coming after Generation X and before Generation Z, the people born roughly between 1981 and 1996 could have been labeled Generation Y, an identification that, had it stuck, would certainly have metamorphosed into “Generation Why” and thence to “Generation Why?” The question mark would have been permanently attached or, at the very least, implied. No generation deserves that. 

     Neither, though, does any generation deserve the unfairness with which Millennials have been treated by other generations, by the media, and for that matter by themselves: all being seen as entitled, immature, avocado-toast-obsessed, and so on and so forth and, and, and. 

     To the attempted rescue comes well-credentialed journalist (The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg News) Charlie Wells, himself a Millennial (well, of course), with a book designed to mix statistical analysis, societal commentary, and personal experience, and thus provide, as its subtitle says, a “Defense of a Generation.” Ay, there’s the rub: this is a defense against – well, against whom or what is not entirely clear, with the result that What Happened to Millennials is something of a book in search of an audience. It seems mostly to be an exercise in self-defense, allowing Millennials to share themselves and their now-midlife thoughts and experiences with other Millennials who will immediately “get it” when a paragraph includes as touchstones both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and “the early 2000s MTV show Diary.” 

     One basic point Wells makes is that it is patently unfair to tar all Millennials with the same brush. True. It is equally unfair to tar all members of any group with the same brush – that is, to judge and critique the whole based on the actions, beliefs or characteristics of a subset. But we humans, being pattern seekers and pattern makers, tend to generalize and encapsulate, and there is nothing unique in doing so where Millennials are concerned: other generational cohorts get the same treatment, which is equally unfair no matter how and to whom it is applied. But the specifics matter, and this is where Wells’ extended interviews with five “representative” Millennials come in, giving statistics and pronouncements a human side. 

     “Representative” does belong in quotation marks, though, since four of Wells’ five exemplars are from a very narrow subset of the Millennial (or any) cohort. Two are from the New York City area, one from San Francisco, one from the business-and-banking-and-culture hub of Charlotte, North Carolina. Only one, who is from small-town Ohio, hails from and lives in what coastal residents have long dismissed as “flyover country.” This group of five, each person’s individual background and experience notwithstanding, is pretty much, socially and politically, what the confluence of The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Bloomberg News might be expected to assemble. 

     Nevertheless, Wells, an adept writer who can encapsulate an experience or a personality with considerable skill, does his best to show ways in which his chosen focuses humanize, personalize, individuate and at the same time can be generalized to Millennials as a group. To do this, he writes in a constant stream of what could be called Millennial-speak: one page refers to the TV series Family Matters and film The Meteor Man, another to “one of the realest songs on 50 Cent’s debut studio album” and to “the Neptunes producing tracks for Britney and Justin,” the very next one to the books The Care and Keeping of You and Trauma and Recovery. All these are presumably immediately familiar touchstones, if not for all Millennials, then for the ones with whom Wells wants to connect, and if not for them then for Wells himself – lenses through which he and/or they see, define and are defined by the world at large and by their peers. Miss out on the references and a great deal of What Happened to Millennials becomes incomprehensible. 

     In particular, Britney Spears seems to hold a hallowed place in Wells’ analysis in ways even beyond that of the terrorist mass murders of 9/11/2001. Wells goes on for pages about Spears on MTV, Spears’ 55-hour marriage, Spears shaving her head, Spears in rehab, eventually getting to Spears “doing better now,” her “social media presence,” the variety of photos she posts on Instagram – all leading Wells to opine, “I think Britney Spears is happy.” And so? Well, “so” nothing if you do not follow and fawn over celebrity culture, if you do not choose vapidity as the be-all and end-all of mastering the difficult art of living the best life you can. Wells insists that Spears is important by virtue of having evolved into “just another Millennial.” If that Spears connection does not work for you, you will be a less-than-empathetic consumer of what Wells has to offer. 

     And that brings up again the question of the intended audience for What Happened to Millennials. The pervasive specificity of carefully chosen referents – people, events, etc. – requires thorough familiarity with the “Millennial experience,” however defined. And that does seem deliberately to limit the book’s reach to other members of Wells’ generation, which he defines not only through the commonly used calendar dates but also as consisting of “seventy-two million Americans born between the founding of CNN in 1980 and Fox News in 1996.” Wells does periodically reach out to try to give his book connections outside those of his own age group: “Every generation has to confront society’s evolving assumptions about growing up.” But then he quickly asserts the unique nature of Millennial circumstances, about being “surrounded by stories of how our lives should look at the same time as we’re told to put our own on display. We post updates about moments as prosaic as drinking in strip-mall Irish bars or as private as childbirth, as personal as our first moves into apartments with our romantic partners and as sanctified as our marriages. It’s the kind of attention only celebrities used to get. Britney Spears does it. We do it. We are all storytellers now.” 

     Well, perhaps so. But there is much descriptive and virtually nothing prescriptive in What Happened to Millennials – and even if it is the wrong venue for recommendations, it would be nice if there were a little more “why” about Wells’ narrative: why pay attention to “how our lives should look,” why be told (and by whom) “to put our own on display,” why post about this and that and the other thing and so forth. It may be that Millennial readers will instantly know the why of this or that or will simply accept without thinking that “that’s how things are,” as other generations simply accept or accepted long-term employment or the ubiquity of cellphones. So Wells seems mostly to defend his generation against itself – a defense that, based on the quality of his narrative, is well-wrought but scarcely necessary.

(++++) SILVERY AND SHIMMERING

Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Platero y Yo—An Andalusian Elegy. Niklas Johansen, guitar. OUR Recordings. $23.99 (2 CDs). 

     Multimedia is nothing new: opera, after all, has been around for 400+ years. But the meaning of multimedia and the methods of presenting it have changed with the times for centuries and continue to evolve today. Now OUR Recordings has produced an especially creative and enjoyable – and handsomely packaged – multimedia version of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Platero y Yo, expanding the usual bounds of CDs into an encroachment into DVD territory. 

     Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) was one of the most important guitar composers of the 20^th century and had a 36-year collaborative relationship with Andrés Segovia (1893-1987), which resulted in some three dozen guitar works – of which Platero y Yo, written late in Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s life (1960), is one of the most notable. It is a setting for narrator and guitar of 28 excerpts from the eponymous prose poem written in 1914 by Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958). The original work is discursive and nostalgic, consisting of observations and reminiscences that the narrator presents to and discusses with his donkey, Platero. Since plata means “silver,” platero means “silvery,” and that word is a good description of the gently glowing impression created by the prose poem. Platero symbolizes purity and naïveté and becomes a suitable foil for the narrator as he thinks and reminisces about life, the countryside, and the simple pleasures that seem to be fading as the world (unknowingly except in retrospect) rushes headlong toward World War I. 

     The close integration of Jiménez’ words with Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s illustrative guitar music makes Platero y Yo fully effective only in its original form, but the composer did authorize the work to be performed without the spoken text. That is how it is presented here – but the production takes a clever turn by incorporating the words (including English translations) into the accompanying booklet, which means that even without the original narrative in Spanish (whose cadences are carefully and thoughtfully reflected in much of the musical material), a listener can get a sense of the overall concept of Platero y Yo and can, in effect, become his or her own narrator in his or her chosen language. This adds considerably to the effect of the music, because while some of the inspirations for the settings can be readily inferred from their titles (“Spring,” “White Butterflies,” “The Canary’s Flight,” “Lullaby”), others are confusing or meaningless without the text (“Ronsard,” “Sunday”) and still others are designed to contrast with rather than complement the verbiage (“The Well,” “The Crazy Man”). The guitar writing is exceptionally communicative throughout, and it is certainly possible to listen to the entirety of Platero y Yo – which lasts nearly two hours – without knowing the “framing tale” for the music. But that does a disservice to both Jiménez and Castelnuovo-Tedesco, inappropriately turning this carefully conceived and thought-through work into a kind of background music. 

     This recording is especially interesting for taking Platero y Yo into genuine multimedia territory by incorporating into the presentation a set of thoroughly delightful and sensitively conceived illustrations by Halfdan Pisket (born 1985). Pisket is a visual artist who works primarily in the graphic-novel idiom, but here he shows himself sensitive to a long-ago fantasy world that lacks any of the usual drama and intensity of graphic novels: the illustrations are gentle, subtle, and often mildly amusing – fitting the notion of Jiménez’ narrator that Platero understands everything being told to him even though he lacks language in which to respond. So this Platero y Yo recording invites participatory involvement throughout: listening to the music, reading the words either before or during every item, and looking at Pisket’s evocative illustrations that underline and comment on the music in much the same way that the music underlines and comments on the texts. 

     Throughout, the music remains central, as it should, and Danish guitarist Niklas Johansen is a splendid advocate of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s concept. The composer arranged the 28 pieces in four suites of seven items each, but there is no inherently musical reason for thinking of these highly individualized miniatures as interconnected. Does it mean something that the first three suites conclude with rather crepuscular pieces (“Melancholy,” “Nostalgia,” “Death”), and the fourth with a kind of envoi (“A Platero en el cielo de Moguer,” Moguer being Jiménez’ home town)? Listeners/readers/observers have plenty of opportunities to think about this and other elements of Platero y Yo throughout the presentation – and Johansen’s first-rate playing invites contemplation as well as straightforward enjoyment of his virtuosity and his sensitivity to Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s interpretation of Jiménez’ vision. Platero y Yo is a landmark among 20^th-century guitar compositions and is justly celebrated by guitarists for its musical, expressive and illustrative qualities. The top-notch playing here, and the well-conceived and involving multimedia elements of the overall presentation, should help bring the beauty and meaningfulness of the work to a considerably wider audience.

(++++) FORMS OF COLLABORATION

Poulenc: Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra; Aubade—Concerto for Piano and 18 Instruments; 3 Mouvements perpétuels; Nocturne in C; Suite française; Satie: Descriptions automatiques; Gymnopédie No. 1; Sarabande No. 2; Gnossienne No. 3; Avant-dernières pensées; Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois. Francis Poulenc, piano; Jacques Février, piano; Orchestre National de la RTF conducted by Georges Prêtre; Orchestre des concerts Straram conducted by Walther Straram. SOMM. $18.99. 

Joel Puckett: There Was a Child Went Forth; Trumpet Concerto; Short Stories. Nicholas Phan, tenor; Sean Jones, trumpet; London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Joseph Young. AVIE. $19.99. 

     Although Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) is known nowadays only as a composer, he was a fine pianist, giving performances not only of his own music but also of works by other composers. Thanks to Lani Spahr’s exceptionally well-done restoration of some very old monophonic recordings, some of Poulenc’s pianism is now available on the SOMM label – along with the composer’s insights into his own compositions and some of those by Erik Satie (1866-1925). The CD is a collaborative effort of sorts between Spahr and Poulenc, and it is also collaborative in the specific performances offered: the Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra received its première in 1932 with Poulenc and Jacques Février as soloists, and the 1962 recording heard here features the same pianists; and the recording of Aubade—Concerto for Piano and 18 Instruments, which dates all the way back to 1930, is a collaboration with conductor Walther Straram (1876-1933) and is Poulenc’s only recording of this work. The historic bona fides of these performances are quite clear, but they would be only mildly meaningful if they did not shed considerable light on the music. But they do: Poulenc certainly knew how he wanted his piano-and-orchestra works to sound, and had enough skill at the keyboard to ensure that they came across as he wished. Both concertos have a kind of neoclassical gloss. The D minor is bright and colorful in its outer movements and surprisingly lyrical and expressive in its central Larghetto. The rhythms are clearly delineated in Aubade – which Poulenc originally conceived as a ballet, to a scenario of his own design. The “18 instruments” designation is a trifle complicated: there are two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, one trumpet, two violas, two cellos, two basses, and timpani; hence 18 musicians. But one oboe doubles English horn, and the score calls for three timpani, so there are actually 21 instruments. Be that as it may, the clarity of this performance, although scarcely at the level of the reading of the two-piano concerto, clearly shows Poulenc’s skill at using the modest complement of the ensemble to full advantage, and everything is played with verve and spirit – as is also the case in the D minor two-piano work. Placed between the two concertos on this top-notch disc are solo-piano works recorded in 1950. Poulenc, unsurprisingly, does an exemplary job with his own 3 Mouvements perpétuels and Nocturne in C, and the seven-movement Suite française has never sounded more engaging than it does here, with quicksilver mood changes, firm rhythms and a delightful mixture of expressiveness with piquancy. Poulenc also takes the full measure of the very different – yet clearly, in their own way, related – Satie miniatures, which Poulenc treats as a series of little worlds that are fully formed but retain quizzical elements worthy of careful exploration. Gymnopédie No. 1 has never sounded better: tempo and balance are perfectly aligned. Sarabande No. 2 and Gnossienne No. 3 are also perfectly poised and gently communicative. And the three very short three-movement suites are all an excellent mixture of thoughtfulness with lighthearted exuberance, with their wit and ebullience served up in equal measure. The Satie performances, in fact, are so well-attuned to Satie’s conceptual oddities that they feel like yet another collaborative element of this first-rate recording. 

     The collaboration on a new AVIE disc featuring music of Joel Puckett (born 1977) is on a different level: two of the three works were written for the performers who offer them on this CD. There Was a Child Went Forth (2023) is a four-song cycle for tenor and chamber orchestra, to words by Walt Whitman; it was written for Nicholas Phan. The title song is first in the group, followed by The early lilacs, And his parents, and The village on the highland. The song settings are refreshingly straightforward, the words arranged and emphasized to communicate their meaning to listeners rather than to demonstrate the singer’s capabilities at verbal gymnastics. Whitman’s poetry works well in this approach, and the orchestral accompaniment is nicely designed to highlight elements of the poetry without overwhelming the voice or subsuming the meaning into an overabundant sonic environment. Some of the material is, however, rather overdone – such as the opening of the second song – and steps a bit too enthusiastically into almost-pop-music territory. It is in the third and most inward-looking of the songs, which starts with a finely honed orchestral introduction, that Puckett communicates most clearly, although here the falsetto range for some of the words is less than entirely effective. Phan is fully comfortable with the varied elements of these settings and the vocal techniques required – his unaccompanied opening of the fourth song comes across especially well – and he presents the cycle as engagingly as possible. And Joseph Young is suitably engaged and sensitive in leading the accompaniment. The work is, however, more intermittently than totally engaging, stretched a bit thin in some of its searches for meaningfulness. The Trumpet Concerto (2024) is actually Puckett’s second, and was written for jazz trumpeter Sean Jones. It does not slip immediately into imitative-of-jazz mode, however: the slow opening movement, with a dissonant-sound-cloud feeling from which the trumpet emerges only gradually, is more beholden to modernistic compositional techniques than to the blues. Jones’ extended solo through the movement’s midsection certainly displays his improvisational technique to good effect. The second movement is intriguingly marked Simple, like remembering an old song, and this heart of the concerto is affecting and features some well-highlighted instrumental touches from the orchestra; once again, Young shows his sensitivity to Puckett’s vision. The work’s fourth and last movement is a technical showcase for Jones and is in a significantly slower tempo than usual for a finale. Jones’ remarkable abilities are certainly impressive: the way he extracts barely-trumpet-like sounds from his instrument will certainly please devotees of contemporary works that seek to extend instruments’ aural worlds. Apart from the auditory gymnastics of the soloist, though, the concerto is not especially appealing: it is an effective showpiece for Jones but a bit of a drag for an audience interested in melody, harmony and pacing variety. The most-successful work on this CD is the only one not written for the performers heard here. It is Short Stories, a 2013 concerto for string quartet and orchestra, with the solo quartet including violinists Benjamin Marquise Gilmore and Julián Gil Rodriguez, violist Gillianne Haddow, and cellist David Cohen. Written in eight brief movements, Short Stories blossoms from the start with a full-throated orchestral sound that contrasts very well with that of the solo quartet, which is called on sometimes to play as a group and sometimes as individuals. These soloists are themselves members of the London Symphony Orchestra, and clearly they and their fellow musicians are fully comfortable with each other’s complementary roles as well as with their individual parts. Short Stories is subdivided into three parts, the first and third having three movements while the second has two. This superstructure gives the work an arrangement more or less reflective of that of a traditional three-movement concerto, progressing from a generally dramatic and expansive opening part to a quieter and more-delicate central one (whose two solo-instrument-focused movements, Recitative and Mother and Child, are elegantly expressive), and then to a strongly accented and intense conclusion. There are no words in these “stories,” but their ups and downs, their comings and goings, their difficulties and resolutions, come through with greater clarity and power than Puckett brings to the tenor-led cycle heard elsewhere on this disc. Of the pieces here, Short Stories is the work most likely to appeal to listeners not only on an initial hearing but also on subsequent ones. The disc as a whole is a (+++) offering, but Short Stories is a (++++) work that demonstrates convincingly just how communicative Puckett can be in some of his compositions, if not in all of them.

(+++) THE ROMANTIC TEMPERAMENT

Paganini: 24 Caprices for Solo Violin, Op. 1—excerpts; Cantabile in D; Sonata a preghiera, “Moses Fantasy.” Tomás Cotik, violin; Monica Ohuchi, piano. Centaur. $15.99. 

Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II. Christopher O’Riley, piano. Navona. $16.99 (2 CDs). 

     Beautifully played but peculiarly conceptualized and programmed, a new Paganini-focused CD featuring violinist Tomás Cotik is a recital in search of an audience. Cotik quickly establishes his bona fides in Paganini’s ever-fascinating set of 24 Caprices – but performs only 17 of them, and in a decidedly strange and well-nigh inexplicable sequence: Nos. 6, 20, 21, 1, 17, 9, 11, 16, 2, 13, 14, 23, 22, 10, 5, 18, and 24. Well, thank goodness that at least No. 24, the capstone of the series and the most difficult of all, appears at the end – but it is actually not quite the end of this Centaur CD, since these excerpts from Paganini’s Op. 1 are bookended by two of the composer’s violin-and-piano works: the Cantabile in D (one of Paganini’s violin-and-guitar duets, although this violin-and-piano version is more often performed) and the Moses Fantasy on the G string (tuned scordatura to B-flat, a minor third higher). This last work, with Cotik joined by pianist Monica Ohuchi, is the conclusion and highlight of the disc, played with tremendous panache and every possible Romantic-era nuance available in the music, which is a set of variations on the aria Dal tuo stellate from Rossini's Mosè in Egitto. A display piece par excellence, this fantasy not only shows Paganini’s extraordinary skill at creating a thoroughly engaging work performed on a single string (hard to imagine without hearing it!) but also gives the violinist ample opportunity to display a combination of technical virtuosity with emotive ability. Cotik holds forth beautifully here, and indeed his partnership with Ohuchi is a fine display of complementary temperaments not only in this piece but also in the Cantabile in D, wherein both players extract from the music all of its superficial but highly attractive lyricism. However, the majority of the CD is devoted not to these two delightful pieces but to the odd assortment of excerpts from the famous Op. 1 sequence. There is nothing to complain about in Cotik’s handling of these pieces: he takes the full measure of every one of them, exploring their intricacies with considerable skill and not hesitating to bring forth the oddities of their expressiveness – notably, for instance, in No. 13 in B-flat, “The Devil’s Laughter,” which takes on a suitably sarcastic edge, and No. 10 in G minor, which slides hither and thither as if it is going out of control but (of course) never actually does. And Cotik nicely emphasizes the Romanticism underlying Paganini’s approach through his own willingness to vary tempos here and there, as with considerable rubato at the start of No. 24. But although it is all very fine and very enjoyable, it is also very strange. What audience is there for this disc? It cannot be anyone’s first choice for the Caprices, since it does not offer all of them and proffers the ones it does present in meaningless order. It certainly can be a first choice for the two violin-and-piano works, especially the Moses Fantasy, but how many listeners will be interested in acquiring a complete CD for a seven-minute work, no matter how well played? Anyone who gravitates to first-rate violin playing will appreciate and enjoy what Cotik displays here, but the oddity of the selection and presentation of the music makes this at best a limited-audience release. 

     Limited in a different way and for different reasons, the new Navona recording of Book II of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier by Christopher O’Riley shares more than a little of the Romantic orientation of Cotik’s handling of Paganini. And that is exactly the problem. Putting aside the never-ending debates about playing The Well-Tempered Clavier on a modern piano – those are likely to remain never-ending in perpetuity – it does seem distinctly old-fashioned, if one does play the music on a contemporary concert grand, to use the instrument to extract substantial emotionalism from Bach’s work. Indeed, the question is whether the emotive material is extracted from what Bach wrote – or is imposed on the music and introduced into it at O’Riley’s behest. Certainly Book II contains intricacy and technical complexity that is generally beyond the purview of the better-known Book I, but that does not make it any less of a Baroque work; and O’Riley’s determination to use the resources of the piano to present the material sonorously and in thick textures, with considerable pedal use and emotion-emphasizing rubato from time to time, seems more reflective of an old-fashioned approach to Bach than of any new insight that can be brought to The Well-Tempered Clavier through use of a keyboard instrument with capabilities far different from those of Bach’s time. O’Riley’s essentially Romantic approach to the music is pervasive: the C minor Prelude glows with warmth even as its flow is repeatedly interrupted by rubato; the D major Prelude starts with a clarion call that soon becomes a rhythmically softened exercise in lyricism; the gentle F major Prelude slows down so much that it sounds like a proto-Chopinesque nocturne; and so forth. In the fugues, where regularity of pacing and careful attention to contrapuntal principles are crucial, O’Riley’s approach is even more distant from anything remotely historically informed: the blending of lines in the E-flat major, determined focus on the right hand over the left in the F-sharp minor, strong attacks on downbeats in the G minor, delicate interweaving of lines in the A major – these effects and many more show a consistency of approach throughout that indicates that O’Riley has carefully thought through what he wants to say about The Well-Tempered Clavier and how he wants to say it. The result is a performance of thoroughgoing cohesiveness from start to finish, one with much more warmth than is usually heard in this music – and one that, at least from a historical perspective, is entirely wrongheaded. That does not mean wrong, since the music is very well-played throughout and there are so many matters of opinion (and performance) when it comes to Bach that it would be the height of arrogance to label a particular reading “correct” or “incorrect.” But it does mean that O’Riley’s handling of the music has something a bit fusty about it, reflective of a time when it was thought that Bach needed to be “modernized” and presented on up-to-date instruments with up-to-date emotional expressiveness. This is a recording filled with warmth and sensitivity – which, however, are more reflective of what O’Riley inserts into the music than of what Bach put into it.